CMoore.com

People seem to like big brother OK

Now that Vivendi and General Electric have struck a deal, cable giant Comcast is expected to to buy a controlling stake in NBC-Universal; marking the biggest proposed media merger in recent memory. Comcast, the largest cable company and the No. 1 residential Internet service provider in the nation, would take over the NBC empire: a television network, Universal Studios, MSNBC, CNBC, USA Network, Telemundo, the Weather Channel, Hulu.com, 27 television stations and a host of other properties.

This train wreck of a deal will hurt all over. It will mean increased costs for cable television service; currently free online NBC content locked behind a pay wall; less opportunity for the distribution of independent media; even fewer choices and less programming diversity. On average, nearly one quarter of all channels offered to cable subscribers will be owned by the bloated Comcast.

I’m not sure I buy that this deal must mean free content moving behind a pay wall, but for the rest… pretty much. Consolidation of formal, accepted media (that is, not the internet) into such a small number of companies is a Really Bad Idea, for democracy, freedom, and overall entertainment value. Think about it – in just a few months, 80% of everything you see on TV will be coming from one of four companies. That’s just crazy.

Ms. Nazemson, while hosting a Swedish call in show, totally blows chunks… and gets right back on with the show.

Now there is a trooper.

(she blames the vomitus on menstrual cramps, by the way)

If the media is supposedly so damned liberal, why is the empty polemicist psychopath tallow-catch known as Ann Coulter given countless hours of screen time across multiple networks and column inches in magazines, while Noam Chomsky is ignored?

Just askin.

Bloated Drug Whore via Think Progress

This Haditha story, this Haditha incident, whatever, this is it folks, this is the final big push on behalf of the Democratic Party, the American left, and the Drive-By Media to destroy our effort to win the war in Iraq. That’s what Haditha represents – and they are going about it gleefully. They are ecstatic about it- Folks, let me just put it in graphic terms. It is going to be a gang rape. There is going to be a gang rape by the Democratic Party, the American left and the Drive-By Media, to finally take us out in the war against Iraq. Make no bones about it.

Ecstatic… gang rape… Yeah, and we’re the fever swamp.

Just think, our government pays to broadcast this guy every day across Armed Forces Radio.

Short answer: looks like it.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong.

This echoes my thoughts almost precisely. The bookies, too, were betting on Kerry. The bookies!

I’m generally loathe to join in conspiracy theories, but I think it a likely truth that the last two national elections were stolen from we, the People. The scale of the corruption and antidemocratic evil is just so astounding that is almost incomprehinsible, and to quote Han Solo, “I can imagine a lot.” It may not be centrally directed (who needs to centrally direct when you’ve got willing, fanatical authoritarian participants in positions of power in every county? You read the bulletpoint memo and let them loose), but the corrupt effort is widespread, and on the state level pervasive, particularly as to intimidation and disenfranchisement via bureaucratic moves or lies (adding up to more than vote count fraud, though I have no studies to back me up as the subject is impossible to study).

However, as there’s no clenis involved and the fascists GOP holds all the reins of power, there will never be an investigation, nor will anyone be held accountable. Except the powerless and the small whose backs are going to be first against the wall, that is. The media hand-waves it all away without really looking at the issue. After all, what’s in it for them?

Kennedy’s article is the most important so far on our disenfranchisement, not necessarily due to the depth, but due to the publication it appears in – Rolling Stone. This is the widest reading yet and as close to mainstream as this will probably ever become. Hell, I may have covered this a couple times before (here and here), but Jane and Joe Schmoe have probably never even considered the issue.

Once the sheeple wake up and realize we’re living under the autocratic thumb of authoritarian cultists with no democratic legitimacy, well… I’m sure they’ll flip the channel right back to American Idol.

But a couple might not.

Update: Manjoo raises substantive issues with RFKjr’s article. RFKjr has been reliable in the past, but it is possible he overreached and possibly been dishonest. I’m looking forward to the reply.

Update 2: RFK responds. I find Manjoo’s overall points uncompelling and his rebuttal of the RFK response particularly weak. I think what we can all agree on is that something about the results from Ohio 2004 stinks like a frat house bathroom the night after a party. The particulars may not be precise, but we know something was up, as all the results went wildly in favor of the GOP beyond all reason or expectation, and the situation needs to be examined and fixed.

For the 10 remaining people in this country (non-wignut division) who continue to believe that the media has a liberal bias, Jamison Foser is here to help clear your delusions.

The dominant political force of our time is not Karl Rove or the Christian Right or Bill Clinton. It is not the ruthlessness or the tactical and strategic superiority of the Republicans, and it is not your favorite theory about what is wrong with the Democrats.

The dominant political force of our time is the media.

Time after time, the news media have covered progressives and conservatives in wildly different ways — and, time after time, they do so to the benefit of conservatives.

It’s a good article with lots of examples, including some very recent ones such as that piece of shit article Weisberg at Slate wrote about Hilary Clinton’s iPod playlist, and that piece of shit front page NYT story about whether the Clinton’s get it on (and how often), and the new baseless attacks on Gore. Be prepared to have your ragemetere set to 11, though.

The funny thing about this movie is that there are clearly 3 groups to hate and mock here.

1. The dude who goes to the library to look at porn and whack off, AKA The Loser;
2. His dad, who obviously has anger management and likely substance abuse issues, AKA The Raging Asshole;
3. The reporter, who is a condescending prick constantly making references to THE CHILDREN (as in “this computer is only feet away from THE CHILDREN”) as if it is somehow relevant; AKA The Pandering Dickhead.

Anyway, the movie’s pretty cringeworthy. I considered it for humor Friday, but it’s just too sad and it didn’t really strike me as funny. I’ll have to keep looking.

(I would embed it here, but it breaks my site formatting, so until I take the time to fix it, youtube has the movie)

war dissenters are the dupes and tools of Zarqawi and al Qaeda

There have always been people who have opposed wars…I think we just have to accept it, that people have a right to say what they want to say, and to have an acceptance of that and recognize that the terrorists, Zarqawi and bin Laden and Zawahiri, those people have media committees.

They are actively out there trying to manipulate the press in the United States. They are very good at it.

I would write more, but right now Zarqawi is making me pound my head into my desk for living in a country ruled by such morons.

I knew you could! Gimme a G! an R! a A! a V! an I! a TAS! What’s that spell? the end of serious journalism Gravitas!

On her 15th anniversary on “Today,” Katie Couric told viewers Wednesday she‘s leaving NBC to join CBS, where she will become the first woman appointed to anchor a network evening newscast alone.

Hours later, CBS confirmed that she will be anchor and managing editor of the evening news. Couric, 49, will also do prime-time specials and contribute to “60 Minutes” as part of the five-year deal.

For the SAT studiers out there, Dan Rather:Katie Couric as Thurgood Marshall:Clarence Thomas

Looks like the plagiarizing nepotista entitlement box turtle baby ben has been sacked.

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday.

An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately.

I’m sure he meant “resigned” resigned. Couldn’t happen to a more worthy individual.

Not only has the WaPo blown all credibility with their continued employment of Bob Woodward, and their GOP-mouthpiece status throughout the Clinton & Bush administrations, now they’ve decided to “correct” the “liberal” bias by putting up a right wing blog by 24 year old Ben Domenech.

I figured this was par for the course; the kid’s a home-schooled idiot, dropped out of W&M college, and thinks that Ann Coulter is the height of discourse. He is also a medal winner in the non-enlisting in the armed forces wing of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, who also used his special status as a Puerto Rican to receive massive amounts of wellfare for his college years, and does not believe in evolution. We’ve been calling him “Box Turtle” Ben because he continued the repressed homo weird conservative obsession of bestiality by comparing the acceptance of gay marriage with people fucking box turtles.

In short, he’s a whiny entitlement baby whose mouth is much bigger than his convictions. His one claim to fame is that he was a co-founder of the faux right wing community site red state.

… buuuuut his dad worked hand-in-hand with Jackoff Abraham, so the Post decides to offer balance (to what?) and hires this mental midget to put up a third-rate blog on a formerly first-rate paper.

That’s fine, I thought. He’ll be well-paid to be an ignored, ignorant blowhard who just repeats RNC talking points and calls Coretta Scott King a “communist” while saying that Red Dawn is one of the greatest movies of all time and comparing the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. He’s also a racist bigot who dreams of death to all “liberals” (read: those who oppose Bush). You know, garden variety worthless nutjobby. Not coincidentally, I didn’t care because I thought that his idiocy would bring even more people to the progressive side, much as using that Stalinist Cockburn on the WSJ editorial page did for conservatives.

Today, however, it is revealed that not only is he an unthinking dittohead parrot… he’s also a plagiarist. Multiple times. He’s scrubbing all of his old posts wherever he can, but the Internet is awash with a captured trail of massive plagiarism. The WaPo can put whatever mouthbreathing knuckledragger they want on their opinion pages, but plagiarism cannot be countenanced.

Too bad about that whole Internet thing, huh, Benny. Really a kick in the balls to be shown for the worthless cretin you are. Here’s to the hoist currently residing in your petard region.

There are tons of links all over for this stuff; throw a rock, you hit 3 people finding new articles that Box Turtle plagiarized (best part is that he even plagiarized the box turtle line from his own comment section). Here’s a few:
dKos, Your Logo Here, Firedog lake, dfire…

FAIR recently did some yeoman work in collecting the quotes of the chickenhawk brigade and busheviks regarding the invasion of Iraq. You know, those cheeto-stained basement bloggers, pundits, and drunken catholigayhiv+ fucktards who classified everyone, such as yours truly, who opposed the war for any reason. They even went so far as to call anti-Iraq war opponents as traitors, a fifth column, cowards, appeasers, and idiots.

Am I angry? Oh… a tad.

Well, bitches, you reap what you sow. I was right, for all the right reasons, and everything I predicted has come to pass. Quagmire, civil war, making us weaker, making us a pariah nation, strengthening the terrorists, and making us more vulnerable. It’s actually been worse than I predicted, since I never countenanced that we would have a government that actively supports torture and the destruction of the Constitution. My bad.

The blood of thousands upon thousands of people is at least partially on the hand of people like the entire Faux “news” staff, Andrew Sullivan, the knuckledraggers at the Corner, the NYT, the Washington Post, and the rest of the high-income punditocracy.

Here are a few choice quotes:

“The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war.”
(Fox News Channel’s Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)

“Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we’d seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking.”
(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation–Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)

“The war winds down, politics heats up…. Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.”
(PBS’s Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech)

“Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?”
(Fox News Channel’s Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)

“I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)

“This will be no war — there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention…. The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling…. It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on.”
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate– cited in the Observer, 3/30/03)

“Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb and the desperate could ignore it.”
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)

Mmmm… I love the smell of crow in the morning.

The brass and other REMFs, at least. If 72% of the troops want out of Iraq right now, imagine how many more there would be if the military was not censoring non-right wing news sites.

O’Reilly – OK
Air America – blocked
Limbaugh – OK
Al Franken – blocked
G. Gordon Liddy – OK
Wonkette – blocked
ABC’s “The Note” – OK

… sensing a trend?

Remember, our tax dollars are also hard at work broadcasting Bloated Drug Addict Limbaugh over Armed Forces Radio while there is no comparable left or center program.

Could Faux news possibly become any more Stalinistic?

Fox News featured two onscreen captions during a segment on escalating violence in Iraq that read: ” ‘Upside’ To Civil War?” and “All-Out Civil War in Iraq: Could It Be a Good Thing?”

Other upcoming segments:

Media Matters has a study of talk show guests from 1997-2005

The Sunday-morning talk shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC are where the prevailing opinions are aired and tested, policymakers state their cases, and the left and right in American politics debate the pressing issues of the day on equal ground. Both sides have their say and face probing questions. Or so you would think.

In fact, as this study reveals, conservative voices significantly outnumber progressive voices on the Sunday talk shows. Media Matters for America conducted a content analysis of ABC’s This Week, CBS’ Face the Nation, and NBC’s Meet the Press, classifying each one of the nearly 7,000 guest appearances during President Bill Clinton’s second term, President George W. Bush’s first term, and the year 2005 as either Democrat, Republican, conservative, progressive, or neutral. The conclusion is clear: Republicans and conservatives have been offered more opportunities to appear on the Sunday shows – in some cases, dramatically so.